Converting More Social Media Followers Into Customers

Bookmark
8 min readJul 13, 2021

I’m not sure if I’m ready to admit this, but there is a good chance that most of the content we consume in a day is from social media. Or even from a friend that saw something on social media. Or a friend of a friend… okay, I think you get the point. Social media is everywhere. And it’s also how businesses reach people.

And that right there is why social selling is the most overlooked form of marketing since many people are confused about what it means in the first place. Maybe you’ve heard of social selling, but you aren’t entirely sure what it means.

So you are probably thinking, “that’s a type of social media strategy, right?”

Spoiler alert. It’s not.

In a nutshell, social selling lets businesses laser-target an audience and build relationships with networks in order to turn followers into customers. In this article, we share many social selling statistics that will convince you the benefits are real.

Let’s get to it.

The Revolution in Media

I still remember the days of radio, television, and print. Sigh, they were some good days.

But, I honestly do think things have gotten better. Not only is digital media very important, but social media has genuinely trumped it all. Seeing how marketing has shifted, companies have moved more of their budget into the digital media space and focus their marketing more on social media. You must keep in mind that with a change in media, there’s a change in messaging.

Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. Pinterest. What else am I forgetting? Oh of course, our new friend TikTok. These are all social media platforms that businesses use to build personal communities for customers to connect with your products and services, share their stories and ideas, and connect with each other.

Just think about it.

When you build this community of customers in charge of your storytelling, you get something genuine and raw that no marketing brainstorm could come up with. Not only that, they are indirectly (or sometimes directly) endorsing your business to other members of your community (we’ll talk about influencers soon). Lastly, you need to understand it’s not about who’s telling your story, it’s about whose story you are telling.

Create Your Fans

You wouldn’t speak to a wine enthusiast the same as you would a monster truck fan. I’m not saying there are no monster truck fans out there enjoying a nice glass of pinot noir, but we need to develop our audience.

So, before you start creating content, you have to know who you are making content for. Who is your target customer? The best way to answer this is to develop your customer persona.

Here are some key factors to think about when creating your personas.

Let’s not stop there. Here are some questions to ask as you build their psychographic profile.

  • What is their lifestyle like?
  • Do they have any hobbies or interests?
  • What is the personal characteristic of your customers?
  • Do they have any notable beliefs or attitudes?

Answer these questions, and voila! You now have your customer persona created to help choose the right platform and build the right content that piques their interest. When you understand your core customers better, you not so magically create better content and learn how to engage them at a higher level. This is because you know who they are and what they like.

Share Others Content

When it comes down to it, people will always come back if they are given great content, or at least spread good word of mouth around! Keep in mind, this doesn’t specifically mean solely the content you create. This can also come for other resources if your brand and your content curation.

Now you may seem a little confused about why you wouldn’t want to create everything, but in fact, content curation builds more value for your audience. Being able to offer some sort of value to your customer’s life that right now builds trust. And trust, trust is what every business wants… Well, trust is genuinely what everyone just wants.

So you want to turn followers into customers with content to create value and value to build trust. Now, why couldn’t we do this without sharing content that isn’t yours? Well, if you only ever post about your company, not only might it start being redundant and boring, the media will become boring, but it will feel like your business is only interested in selling its products. For obvious reasons, we want you to stay away from this!

People do not like to feel like they’re being “sold to”.

People want to decide themselves on what they want to buy. So when you start incorporating outside content, this feels less of a sell and more about educating your customer with the right tools to make their own decisions.

Take it to The Polls

The best way to turn followers into customers is to make your business more you. Be human. Create a conversation with your customers. This helps immensely in so many ways. You start to really get to know what your customer wants while they see the human side of the business.

So, how do you do this? Well, there’s many different ways. A simple but excellent way is polling. Polls keep you in the loop with what your fans want from being a part of your community on social media. Make them fun, potentially make them a weekly feature of your content.

Polls are funny and easy to do while getting feedback from your users and can be an invaluable source of feedback for a business. They are simple. Which is why they are so great. Businesses can learn so much about their customers. And once you know your customer better, you know how to talk to them better, reach out to them better, and give them what they want better.

Twitter is excellent for polls-quick and simple much like the platform. Don’t forget, Facebook and Instagram also have poll options, though this gets into what platform is best for your business and customers.

Picking Platforms

The world of social media is enormous, so big that it’s too much to be everywhere, and honestly, you shouldn’t be. Your best plan would be to focus on two, max three, different platforms your customer persona is most active on.

How do you find that out? Well, it’s actually easier than you think!

Here are some great insights on age groups, gender, and time spent for each platform. With the customer personas you created, age is a large demographic of how you reach and speak to them. Here are the largest age groups for the major social media platforms.

Now that we know the age brackets, here is the average time that these people are hanging out on each platform.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of determining where your ideal customer persona spends their time interacting with social media. Then you can start to learn more about their demographic and psychographic in order to turn followers into customers.

Make It Exclusive

Exclusivity works wonders. This isn’t new, and we all know it.

When anyone who’s anyone can get it, it doesn’t hold much desire to have. The moment you add limitations, that’s when people start turning their heads.

So how do you use this to help build your business? Offer something of value with limitations. Perhaps offer promotions specific to the platform of your choosing. Make the offers available for Facebook followers only.

Discounts and promotions often work best. However, exclusive giveaways and action-based offers can help boost your social media presence and turn followers into customers.

Keep It Engaging

So you finally have your customer personas and the perfect platform to reach them up. You are creating polls and building a community. Things are great, but we want to keep them great. Which means we need to keep them engaged. Adding anticipatory posts and creating user-generated content is a reliable way to keep engagement high.

Anticipatory Content

Everyone loves a secret. It’s something the mass doesn’t know about, and you feel privileged to know. So one way to secure the interests of your followers for a future product or service is to tease it on your social media to garner awareness and excitement. These posts can show pictures of prototypes, event pictures, employees hard at work, before and after photos.

User-Generated Content

As known as, UGC is a very effective marketing tactic. In order to turn followers into customers, you need to understand the followers first. They love being seen on a social media platform that they follow. From there, they can repost, showing their friends and family-doesn’t that sound awesome?

So, how do you get UGC? Well, just ask! You can make it into a contest, or just ask them to show off your new summer collection! This is all very easy traction, and not to mention free content, for you. This will result in their following seeing your brand. This naturally leads your brand to gain more followers.

Take Away

I’m not going to lie, that was a lot to take in. Let it all sink in, go over it again and start making your plan for social selling. It really does start and end with the customer. You want to understand your customer and what they want. Remember, customers want to feel empowered to make their own decisions when purchasing, so encourage their empowerment most of all. Lastly, trust. Build a social media community, get discussions started, create polls-all these elements will help you build trust. And trust is what will encourage your sales the most.

And don’t forget, you aren’t alone. Bookmark has tools to help turn followers into customers.

It’s that time to sign off, and I hope you come back next week for our next blog to help upgrade you and your website. If you’d like to learn more about social commerce, click here.

Originally published at https://www.bookmark.com on July 13, 2021.

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